Wilson County Historical Society

Talk of Wilson County TX Historic Towns

by Barbara J. Wood

CIVIL WAR

"Eighty Years Under The Stars and Bars"

"Eighty Years Under The Stars and Bars" By Thomas Fletcher Harwell (Author published, 1947, 108 pages.)

The full title of this fascinating and excellent read's full is, "Eighty Years Under The Stars and Bars: Including Biographical Sketches of 100 Confederates I Have Known, United Confederates Veterans' Organization History of Camp McCulloch, U. C. V., And other Confederate Information."

This fascinating read is the history and reminiscences of these great Confederate Soldiers who served in the Texas Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, and Navy and were members of the UCV Ben McCulloch Division. The soldiers were interviewed during their "twilight years," about what regiment they belonged to, and what they did in the Civil War.

From men who were officers down to private their history is a invaluable source of first hand information to the life of a Confederate soldier from Texas and other states in the Confederacy, in both the western and eastern theaters of the war.

Many of the men served in famous regiments and brigades from Hood's Texas Brigade to Terry's Texas Rangers they provide a fascinating history of their exploits during the war. Men such as W. M. Allen who was in the 32nd Texas Cavalry, P. D. Turner who was a soldier in Sibley's invasion of New Mexico and Arizona, J. B. Polley of the Fourth Texas Infantry in Hood's Texas Brigade who fought in the many battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, G. A. Petty of the 18th Mississippi who was in Forest's famous cavalry brigade. There are over 100 of the brief biography and stores these soldiers told.

Many of these soldiers would become officers and brigade commanders in the United Confederate Veterans Association in Travis and Hays Counties, Texas. Mr. Harwell (the author/editor) was the son of a Confederate soldier and for over a forty plus years time-span interviewed the old Confederates and also gathered the obituaries of the men of Camp McCulloch. As a tribute to his father, Mr. Harwell did an outstanding job of telling these mens' stories and history. In 1947, when the book was published, only 108 Confederate Veterans were still alive, and Mr. Harwell says that once these men are gone an invaluable piece of history is also gone. The photographs of these old soldiers still show the tenacity and fighting spirit in their eyes. These men were proud of their service and rightly so.

The stories the men told range from the battle of First Manassas (Bull Run), Gaines' Mill, Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge), Shiloh, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Atlanta Campaign, the siege of Petersburg, and the surrender of the ANV, Johnston's Army, Forests' surrender and many other battles and events. The stories and brief biographies are riveting and at 108 pages long it makes for a short read. This is unfortunate because you want to read much more of the soldiers of Texas and soldiers who served in other States in the Confederacy during the war and settled in the Austin, Texas area.

The author's dedication is:

" This book is affectionately dedicated by the author to General Henry T. Dowling of Georgia, Commander In Chief of the United Confederate Veterans to His Comrades - the small and feeble remnant, Who are still living, and to the memory of that Innumerable Host, Who have already stacked arms and pitched their tents on the external camping grounds, Kyle, Texas 1947." Mr. Harwell's excellent book of the men of Texas who fought in the war from 1861 to 1865, is a fine tribute to the memory of the brave men of the south, and the men of the Civil War of Texas. This is a scarce book to find, but it is an INVALUABLE and a MUST HAVE for anyone who is interested in Texas History, Texas Confederate History, the Confederacy, and the Civil War overall. A GREAT READ and TRIBUTE!

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Courtesy / Joe Owen Civil War Texas

Civil War Texas

CIVIL WAR TEXAS .... On January 14, 1898 former 1st Sergeant C. C. Cummings of the 17th Mississippi Infantry Regiment wrote to the Caldwell News-Chronicle (Caldwell, Texas) and writing the newspaper about what happened to his college classmates of Texas during the Civil War. Sgt Cummings would later become a well respected Judge in Fort Worth, Texas.

They attended Wesleyan College in Florence, Alabama. Sgt. Cummings would fight with some of the men in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war all the way to the battle of Gettysburg. The men he fought with at Gettysburg were his close friends and former college mates. The men from Texas he fought with were in the 4th Texas Infantry Regiment. They would charge the Union positions during the hot late afternoon of July 2, 1863. Sgt. Cummings would lose an arm at Gettysburg when a minnie bullet shattered his left arm. Here is his story:

The sudden death of Gen. Sul Ross was a shock to me and his other college mates here in Fort Worth – Henry Edrlegton, Oliver Kennedy and Joe Pankey. He and I were the same year and were in the same class for three years at Wesleyan University, Florence, Ala. Wes. Downs of Waco was in this class. The following Texas boys, then residents of Texas, were in the class below: Oscar Downs, dead; Thos G. Davidson, dead; Haywood Brahan, dead; and Judge Joe Polley, living at Floresville, Texas, Brahan was for a long time identified in state politics under Goree and successor in the management of the penitentiary affairs. And I forgot to name Davis B. Gurley of Waco in the class above us all. Major Gurley and the Downs brothers were with Ross in the west, and followed him throughout all the viclasitudes of his romantic career as rough riders, and won fame eternal in asserting the right to attend to one's own affairs, and forcing others to do the same. Brahan and Polley were in Hood's brigade of Texans in Virginia, where I marched to victory with them through all these fierce fights till I left them at Gettysburg in the Peach Orchard, while they were climbing the rocky heights of Little Round Top and skulking the foe out of Devil's Den. Ask Jim Hasley, walkling the streets here every day, he was there.

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COURTESY / Civil War Texas submitted by Joe Owen, author

FOURTH TEXAS INFANTRY

The Fourth Texas Infantry was one of the three Texas Civil War regiments in the Texas Brigade of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In 1861 Governor Edward Clark established a camp of instruction on the San Marcos River in Hays County. The first units that later formed the Fourth Texas Infantry enlisted there in April 1861. Originally the Texans planned to enlist for a period of one year, but after the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the Confederate government announced that it would accept only regiments enlisted for the duration of the war. In July 1861 twenty companies of Texas infantry were transferred to a camp near Harrisburg and promptly shipped to Virginia. Soon after their arrival in Richmond the Texas units were officially organized into regiments, on September 30, 1861. The ten companies that made up the Fourth Texas were Company A, the Hardeman Rifles, recruited in Gonzales County; Company B, the Tom Green Rifles, Travis County; Company C, the Robertson Five Shooters, Robertson County; Company D, the Guadalupe Rangers, Guadalupe County; Company E, the Lone Star Guards, McLennan County; Company F, the Mustang Greys, Bexar County; Company G, the Grimes County Greys; Company H, the Porter Guards, Walker County; Company I, the Navarro Rifles, Navarro County; and Company K, the Sandy Point Mounted Rifles, Henderson County.

Contrary to the prevailing custom, the Texans were not allowed to elect their own field officers but had them appointed by the Confederate War Department. The first commander of the regiment was Robert T. P. Allen, former superintendent of the Bastrop Military Academy (see TEXAS MILITARY INSTITUTE, AUSTIN), who because of his harsh discipline was extremely unpopular and was forced to resign his position in October. Allen was replaced by Texan John Bell Hood, who was assigned to command the Fourth with the rank of colonel. John F. Marshall, editor of the Austin based Texas State Gazette and one of the principle organizers of the regiment, was appointed to the post of lieutenant colonel, and Virginian Bradfute Warwick was given the rank of major.

The Fourth was formally assigned to Brig. Gen. Louis T. Wigfall's Texas Brigade shortly after Hood assumed command and was subsequently stationed at Dumfries, Virginia, in November 1861. As the regiment drilled and prepared for active duty it was plagued with a great deal of sickness, a rather typical ordeal for Civil War units. In October 1861 the chaplain of the Fourth, Nicholas A. Davis, reported that more than 400 of the regiment's original 1,187 men were sick. In March 1862 Hood was promoted to command of the Texas Brigade, Marshall became a colonel, and Capt. J. C. G. Key of Company A advanced to the post of major.

The regiment first saw combat on the Virginia peninsula on May 7, 1862, at Eltham's Landing, but its introduction to real battle came on June 27, 1862, at the battle of Gaines' Mill. Here both the Texas Brigade and the Fourth Texas established their reputation for hard fighting by successfully breaking the Union line on Turkey Hill, which had resisted all previous Confederate attempts to do so. Taking only 500 men into the battle, the Fourth lost eighty-five men: twenty-one killed, sixty-three wounded, and one captured. Marshal and Warwick were both killed, and Key was wounded.

The Fourth Texas was not engaged again until the battle of Second Manassas on August 30, 1862. Under the command of Lt. Col. B. F. Carter it participated in the Confederate attack on the second day of the fighting, taking a federal battery of artillery in the process. Losses in this engagement totaled thirty-one (eleven killed, twenty wounded). On September 14, 1862, the regiment was engaged in combat at the battle of South Mountain, where it had six men killed and two wounded in the delaying action before the battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), fought on September 17, 1862. At Antietam the Fourth Texas was involved in some of the stiffest fighting on the Confederate left flank and suffered its greatest number of losses for any single battle of the war, losing 210 men (57 killed, 130 wounded, and 23 captured).

The regiment was only marginally engaged at the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 and was not present with Lee's army during the battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. After that, however, it took part in every major action of the Army of Northern Virginia during the rest of the war as well as in the battle of Chickamauga, during the temporary transfer of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's First Corps to the Confederate Army of Tennessee in September 1863. At Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, the Fourth Texas participated in the attack against the Union left flank and in the fighting for Little Round Top, losing 140 men (twenty-five killed, fifty-seven wounded, and fifty-eight captured), including Lieutenant Colonel Carter, who was mortally wounded.

At Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 19 and 20, 1863, the regiment, now under the command of Lt. Col. John P. Bane, was part of the rebel force that broke the federal line on the second day of fighting and helped to rout the Union Army of the Cumberland. The Fourth's losses at Chickamauga totaled seventy-seven (thirty-four killed, forty wounded, and three captured). At the battle of Wauhatchie, during the siege of Chattanooga, Tennessee, on October 28, 1863, the Fourth was routed by the enemy for the only time during the war. Upon the unit's return to Virginia in April 1864 with the rest of Longstreet's corps, the Texans once again acquitted themselves admirably, by plugging a gap torn in the Confederate line at the battle of the Wilderness, May 7, 1864. Here the regiment took part in the famous "Lee to the rear" episode and suffered 124 casualties (twenty-six killed, ninety-five wounded, and three captured) out of only 207 men engaged. Subsequently, the Fourth was marginally involved in the fighting at Spotsylvania and helped to repel the Union attack at Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864. During the fall and winter of 1864–65 the regiment fought around Petersburg and Richmond before taking part in the Southern retreat that ended in the surrender of Lee's army at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Throughout its existence 1,343 men were assigned to the Fourth Texas Infantry. Of that number 256 (19 percent) were killed or mortally wounded in battle. Another 486 men (35.9 percent) were wounded, many more than once, for the total number of wounds suffered by the regiment in four years of fighting amounted to 606. The total number of battle casualties suffered by the Fourth Texas Infantry was 909 (67.7 percent). The number of prisoners lost by the regiment was 162 (12 percent). Of the regiment, 161 died of diseases (11.9 percent), 251 (18 percent) were discharged due to sickness, wounds, etc., and 51 deserted (3 percent). At the time of its surrender the Fourth Texas mustered only fifteen officers and 143 men. Despite such heavy losses, or perhaps because of them, the Fourth Texas Infantry and its parent Texas Brigade won a reputation as one of the hardest fighting and most reliable units in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

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COURTESY /Texas State Historical Society

Bibliography :

Nicholas A. Davis, Chaplain Davis and Hood's Texas Brigade, ed. Donald E. Everett (San Antonio: Principia Press of Trinity University, 1962). Mary Lasswell, comp. and ed., Rags and Hope: The Memoirs of Val C. Giles (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961). Joseph Benjamin Polley, Hood's Texas Brigade (New York: Neale, 1910; rpt., Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Bookshop, 1976). Harold B. Simpson, Hood's Texas Brigade (Waco: Texian Press, 1970). Harold B. Simpson, Hood's Texas Brigade: A Compendium (Hillsboro, Texas: Hill Junior College Press, 1977).

R. V. Arnold and Henry Waters Berryman

Right now, 8:45 a.m. July 2, 1863. Private Henry Waters Berryman, of Alto, Texas, 1st Texas Infantry Regiment has roused up from sleep and looking around the camp of his regiment. He and the soldiers of the 1st Texas Infantry arrived in Gettysburg around 2 a.m., after a long march. Private Berryman knows now that a huge battle is taking place around him. Not since the Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), fought a little under a year ago, has he seen so many signs of a terrible battle. He and his cousin Newt Berryman, heard the sounds of suffering men in hospital tents, many screaming as their limbs are amputated.

Private(s) Berryman have a long wait (almost eight more hours) until they become part of the battle at "The Devil's Den." Private Berryman, wrote home soon after the battle that he saw his cousin, Private Newt Berryman "get shot in the middle of the forehead and go down."

Private Henry Berryman is now grieving for his cousin,whom he was positive was killed, saw Newt rise up, miraculously, and Private Berryman tells his cousin to go back to the hospital tent and get his wound taken cared of.

Newt Berryman tells his cousin, "if every soldier who received a wound in battle go back to the hospital tent, then there wouldn't be any soldiers left to fight the Yankees," and continues to fire his rifle at the Federals. Both men survive the battle of Gettysburg. Henry Berryman wrote a series of letters to his "own ma" as he begins the letters describing the intense and chaotic battle. Many of his friends from home are killed around him at the Devil's Den.

50 years later Private Henry Waters Berryman would take part in the 50th Anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1913, and would write to his newspaper back in Texas that he is "thankful to almighty GOD that both "Rebs" and "Yanks" are now joined together in friendship and brotherhood, united in pride and patriotism of their now united country,"

July 2, 1863, 8:45 a.m. Battle of Gettysburg, 154 years ago.

Below is a photograph of Privates R. V. Arnold (18th Georgia Infantry) and Henry Waters Berryman (gentleman with the long white beard) taken at the Annual Reunion of Hood's Texas Brigade in Floresville, Texas May 10-11, 1915.

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COURTESY / Civil War Texas (Joe Owen Civil War Author)

HOOD'S TEXAS BRIGADE REUNION

..... FLORESVILLE WILSON COUNTY TEXAS 1915 (Long read yet very interesting!)

Right now, 8:45 a.m. July 2, 1863. Private Henry Waters Berryman, of Alto, Texas, 1st Texas Infantry Regiment has roused up from sleep and looking around the camp of his regiment. He and the soldiers of the 1st Texas Infantry arrived in Gettysburg around 2 a.m., after a long march. Private Berryman knows now that a huge battle is taking place around him. Not since the Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), fought a little under a year ago, has he seen so many signs of a terrible battle. He and his cousin Newt Berryman, heard the sounds of suffering men in hospital tents, many screaming as their limbs are amputated.

Private(s) Berryman have a long wait (almost eight more hours) until they become part of the battle at "The Devil's Den." Private Berryman, wrote home soon after the battle that he saw his cousin, Private Newt Berryman "get shot in the middle of the forehead and go down."

Private Henry Berryman is now grieving for his cousin,whom he was positive was killed, saw Newt rise up, miraculously, and Private Berryman tells his cousin to go back to the hospital tent and get his wound taken cared of.

Newt Berryman tells his cousin, "if every soldier who received a wound in battle go back to the hospital tent, then there wouldn't be any soldiers left to fight the Yankees," and continues to fire his rifle at the Federals. Both men survive the battle of Gettysburg. Henry Berryman wrote a series of letters to his "own ma" as he begins the letters describing the intense and chaotic battle. Many of his friends from home are killed around him at the Devil's Den.

Fifty years later Private Henry Waters Berryman would take part in the 50th Anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1913, and would write to his newspaper back in Texas that he is "thankful to almighty GOD that both "Rebs" and "Yanks" are now joined together in friendship and brotherhood, united in pride and patriotism of their now united country,"
July 2, 1863, 8:45 a.m. Battle of Gettysburg, 154 years ago.
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COURTESY / The Portal to Texas History (Cooke, John Esten. The Rockdale Reporter and Messenger (Rockdale, Tex.), Vol. 42, No. 33, Ed. 1 Thursday, October 21, 1915, newspaper, October 21, 1915; Rockdale, Texas.)

COURTESY / Civil War Texas submitted by Joe Fowler